[Mailman-Developers] i18n imports

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "RJ" == Ron Jarrell <jarrell@vt.edu> writes:

    RJ> Jeez, Barry, that itty-bitty change you made last night to not
    RJ> import _ into the namespace by default broke a *lot* of
    RJ> things...

I did that on purpose! :)  Explicit is better than implicit.

>>>>> "TW" == Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> writes:

    TW> It's probably safe to assume that anything that imports
    TW> gettext needs to be modified to import _ explicitly, but I'll
    TW> let Barry draw that conclusion :-)

Actually, Mailman.i18n._() tries to improve on gettext._ by adding the
new sys._getframe() hack to make the marked strings more succinct.  In
other words, where you'd have to write (using gettext as _):

    _('The list %(listname)s has %(membercnt)s non-digest members' %
      {'listname' : mlist.real_name(),
       'membercnt': count_of_non_digest_members(mlist),
       })

You can now write:

    listname = mlist.real_name()
    membercnt = count_of_non_digest_members(mlist)
    _('The list %(listname)s has %(membercnt)s non-digest members')

You have to use string-dict interpolation because the order of words
may be different in different languages.  But it seems ridiculous to
have to write the varnames twice as in the first example (the second
looks worse than it is in practice, because usually the variables you
want to interpolate into the string are already present as local
variables or arguments).

Most modules therefore will "from Mailman.i18n import _" but Errors.py
skips the from...import style to avoid circular imports.

BTW, thanks for the patch Ron.  I've just applied it and will now
review it, but checking in the changes may have to wait.  Seems SF is
refusing my ssh pubkey at the moment.

-Barry